Queer Places:
University Of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2, Regno Unito
7 Kent St, Kendal LA9 4EY, Regno Unito
Herbert
Charles Pollitt (July 20, 1871 - 1942), also known as Jerome Pollitt, was a
patron of the arts and on-stage female impersonator who performed as Diane de
Rougy (a homage to
Liane de Pougy). He became notorious as an Cambridge undergraduate due to
his taste for Decadent art and literature, and was even immortalised as the
eponymous hero of an
E.F.
Benson novel in 1896. He became a very close friend of the artist
Aubrey Beardsley,
and had a brief but significant relationship with the occultist
Aleister Crowley.
Following his time at Cambridge, Pollitt moved to London and saw service in
the First World War as a lance-corporal. He died in 1942.
Pollitt was the son of Charles Pollitt, the proprietor of The
Westmorland Gazette and his wife, Jane. From 1889 he studied at Trinity
College, Cambridge, gaining his BA in 1892 and his MA in 1896.[1]
He became president of Footlights, the Cambridge University Dramatic Club.[2]
He was described as one of the most notorious and talked-about undergraduates
of his tenure, his rooms furnished with pictures by Beardsley,
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Félicien Rops, and his bookshelves
stocked with Decadent works.[1]
Ultimately, he failed to qualify as a doctor.[3]
In late 1897, he decided to be known as Jerome Pollitt.[1]
The name of Pollitt's female alter-ego, Diane de Rougy, was inspired by
Liane de Pougy, a vedette at the Folies Bergère who also had a reputation as
one of Paris's most beautiful and notorious courtesans.[1]
Performance wise, however, de Rougy's noted scarf-dancing was more like that
of the American dancer Loie
Fuller.[1][4]
As the Footlights were largely a masculine establishment, female impersonation
was not uncommon, but de Rougy became particularly renowned for her
performances and as much a local Cambridge celebrity as Pollitt himself.[1][5]
She danced in two plays by Arthur Pilkington Shaw for Footlights, and it was
claimed that her performances made women jealous.[1]
In 1894, Frederick Hollyer exhibited a photographic portrait of de Rougy at
the London Photographic Salon.[3]
Pollitt was a close friend of Aubrey Beardsley and became a collector of
his art alongside other examples of erotica. He was also close to Leonard
Smithers, Beardsley's publisher, from whom he purchased pornography for his
collection. In his last letter, written on his deathbed, Beardsley begged
Smithers and Pollitt to destroy all his erotic drawings and work, a request
which both men ignored.[4][1]
Pollitt was also a collector and sometime patron of James Abbott McNeill
Whistler, and held an at-home exhibition of the artist's etchings in 1910.[3]
While Whistler began painting a portrait of Pollitt in 1896-1897, this
portrait ended up being unfinished and ultimately destroyed.[3]
However, Whistler's lithographic portrait of Pollitt from 1896 and a drawing
survive in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.[3][6]
In October 1897, following his return to Footlights to perform as Diane de
Rougy, Pollitt met Aleister Crowley, and the two swiftly entered into a
relationship.[1][2]
Crowley wrote that "I lived with Pollitt as his wife for some six months and
he made a poet out of me."[1]
The relationship ultimately failed through Pollitt's unwillingness to take
part in Crowley's interest in mysticism.[1]
This led to a quarrel, in which Crowley informed Pollitt that he did not fit
into his plans for his life. Crowley quickly regretted the break-up, but they
did not reconcile, and an accidental snub on Bond Street ultimately estranged
Pollitt from his former lover.[1]
Crowley remained attached to Pollitt, who inspired a number of sonnets and
other poems, and immortalized him in his 1910 book on homosexual love, The
Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz.[1][7]
Finally, in his autobiography The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, he
recalled the end of the relationship as a "lifelong regret."[1]
The exact nature of Pollitt's relationship with Beardsley is unclear,
although the two men shared a keen interest in erotica and transvestism.
Beardsley referred to Pollitt as "My best good friend," and created a
bookplate specially for him that seemed to echo Pollitt's vision of his female
alter-ego.[4]
Pollitt also sent risqué photographs of himself to their mutual friend
Oscar Wilde.[4]
In 1901 Pollitt was living in Marylebone, London.[3]
In August 1914 following the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted in the Royal
Army Medical Corps and served as a Lance-Corporal of the 9159th regiment.[1]
In E.F. Benson's 1896 novel The Babe B.A., the eponymous Babe is a
barely disguised portrait of Pollitt as a student:[1]
The Babe was a cynical old gentleman of twenty years of age, who played
the banjo charmingly. In his less genial moments he spoke querulously of
the monotony of the services of the Church of England, and of the
hope-less respectability of M. Zola. His particular forte was dinner
parties for six, skirt dancing and acting, and the performances of the
duties of half-back at Rugby football. His dinner parties were selected
with the utmost carelessness, his usual plan being to ask the first five
people he met, provided he did not know them too intimately. With a wig of
fair hair, hardly any rouge, and an ingenue dress, he was the image of
Vesta Collins,[8]
and that graceful young lady might have practised before him, as before a
mirror...
The furniture of his rooms was as various and as diverse as his
accomplishments. Several of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations from the
Yellow Book, clustering round a large photograph of Botticelli's
Primavera, which the Babe had never seen, hung above one of the broken
sofas, and in his bookcase several numbers of The Yellow Book, which the
Babe declared bitterly had turned grey in a single night, since the former
artist had ceased to draw for it, were ranged side by side with
Butler's Analogies, Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour, and Miss
Marie Corelli's
Barabbas.[9]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Charles_Pollitt